Detail of lamp housings

An installation of street lamps for the Laumeier Sculpture Park upper parking lot.  The work takes as it’s starting point the simple needs of staff and venue for a nighttime illumination system. Without illumination for the upper parking lot there are existing Public Safety concerns for both visitors to nighttime events, concerts, film screenings, etc. and staff who exit the buildings in darkness during the winter months.  This initiative is partilaly fulfilled by the county and is part of the master plan for the park. I propose to intervene in this process and to alter the ordinary utilitarian design object that is the street lamp and make it into something which illuminates park visitors and staff in that other sense of illumination: the sense of illumination or elucidation which is proposed by works of art generally, and in particular, the other works installed in the park.

With this in mind, the intervention I propose begins at the top of the light pole. Here I will fabricate a special lighting fixture, similar in technical features to the text projector lamps I produced in 2008. The lighting fixtures will use a lens and “gobo” system to articulate the light into language. At night, these lamps will be capable of projecting illuminated and colored text onto the parking area In the daytime, the distinctive shapes of these lamps will participate in a dialogue of visual interest with other works in the park.